Bathsheba Peaslee Whateley
Bathsheba Peaslee Whateley, also known as Hellfire Sheba. Her story is related by Nacht and She-Beast to the Three Little Witches:The Three Little Witches : She died in 1682. ... one of the Massachusetts Peaslees, who married Elihu Whateley and moved to the Dunwich area in 1637. She had seven children, only two of whom lived to be adults. After her husband died, she became a recluse, for reasons unclear now. Conventional wisdom differs at this point. Some say that her husband died because he reneged on a promise to something that you should keep your promises to. Others say that Bathsheba killed him, just for practice. Others say that Elihu just died, and Bathsheba went crazy out of grief, bitterness and loneliness. It’s agreed that she began to study strange books that should be way out of the reach of a simple farmwife. There’s evidence that she was in contact with… parties… that are better left well alone. She began a low-key campaign of terror against her neighbors, your basic ‘wicked witch’ stuff. But she made a mistake, and allowed herself to be seen when she kidnapped Judith and Abigail Orne, the twin daughters of Benjamin Orne, a local farmer. ... : “A neighbor saw Bathsheba carry off the two girls, and raised the alarm. The neighbor went to town to raise a posse, but Benjamin Orne went by himself after Bathsheba. The posse caught up with both Benjamin and Bathsheba just as he was strangling her to death on that rock.” Clover let out an ‘eep!’ “Benjamin said that caught up with her just as she had finished disemboweling Judith with a strange obsidian knife on the rock.” Palantir squirmed visibly. “Abigail supported her father’s claim, and the evidence at the scene- primarily Judith’s bloody body- corroborated it as well. Benjamin was fully exonerated when the townsfolk examined Bathsheba’s house. Among other tasteful decorating touches, they found human bones, a book which was bound in an unknown sort of snakeskin that’s scales formed strange unreadable letters, and a skull that was described as ‘neither human nor canine, yet sharing traits of both’.” : She-Beast: “local legend has it that the damned soul of ‘Hellfire Sheba’ is stuck in the stone altar that she sacrificed poor Judith Orne on! They say that she’s damned to serve the thing in the cave for all eternity. And if you go to the long rock by the Devil’s Cave under a full moon and say ‘Hellfire Sheba’ three times, her ghost will come forth and try to get you to sell your soul for power.” : “Both that cave and that stone are loci of incredible malignant power,” Nacht said calmly. “A person should only go there in the daytime, and even then only if they have pressing mundane business. To do otherwise would be to risk their very soul.” : She-Beast: “That rock IS haunted, and that’s the local explanation for how it got that way.” : “And the story of how Bathsheba Whateley killed Judith Orne is legitimate local lore,” Nacht said. “I did the research on it. They burned the book that I mentioned, but the skull was sent to Miskatonic University in 1923 for study. That’s the last anyone’s heard of it.” References Category:Dunwich Category:People Category:Deceased